I am not a big fan of chores. One of the drawbacks to living alone is that there is no one with whom to share the chores. It is not that I am not a clean person; I just have a little touch of OCD, so when I start cleaning, I do not finish for a few hours because I cannot stop until everything is shiny and perfect. My absolute least favorite chore is taking out the trash. I live in a condo and we do not have individual garbage cans that get rolled out to the end of the driveway and emptied. We have a trash compactor, which is not super close to my unit. This means that after I bag up the stinky, smelly garbage (because it really doesn’t matter what you put in it; it is always gross), I have to load it up in my car and drive it to the compactor. Then, I have to endure the lovely scent of all of the neighborhood’s waste as I chuck my bags in to the compactor. I have a pretty significant list of desires for my dream man and one of them is that I never have to ask him to take out the trash or have take it out myself; then, I will know it is true love.

This morning, as I was packing up my garbage, I thought, “I hate doing this.” Then, my mind wanted to engage in this extended diatribe about how if I had a man, I wouldn’t have to take out the garbage and life would be so great. And, just as I started down that road, I felt something whiz past my nose. I could barely see it, but it kept buzzing around my head. It was a fruit fly. For anyone who doesn’t know, these tiny insects are very annoying, and unlike regular flies, they are hard to see and too small for a flyswatter. This is what happens when you live in Florida, or I am guessing anywhere hot, and you are dealing with trash outside; these little buggers are everywhere. They love garbage almost as much as I hate it. Nonetheless, that little pest changed my thinking. I still hate taking out the garbage and want a man to do it (reverse chauvinism, I know), but I realized that getting rid of the trash, literally and figuratively is a necessary task.

Think about what happens when you let garbage into your thought process. “You’re fat.” “You’re ugly.” “You’re stupid.” “You’re unlovable.” It is one thing to bag those thoughts up and put them in the garage of your mind until you have time to stop by the dumpster. But, as those thoughts fester in that hot, sweltering garage, the fruit flies start swarming. So, you still hear the negativity buzzing all around you. You have to completely discard the rubbish in order to be free from its effects. In my compactor it gets smashed, then hauled off and dumped. The same thing has to happen with any kind of junk in our lives. Beyond our thought lives, there is some refuse we need to clear in relationships (well, some relationships are refuse), in our finances, and in our habits. We cannot just bag it up and store it until we have time to deal with it; pack it up, dump it, and do not go back looking for it. Stop calling it, texting it, spending money it, spending time with it. Get rid of it; ALL of it! Taking out the trash in our lives allows us to have a cleaner, fresher outlook. It gives God the opportunity to fill those newly emptied spaces. As much as it is not my favorite chore, there is a quantifiable benefit. Ms. EV